What are recent AI software systems and research papers close to J. Pitrat's ideas?
Today one of the challenges is learning representations/concepts that are causally invariant. Once we have good representations then we can work on the reasoning aspect. There are 2 camps of people today. One believes that symbolic manipulation cannot be achieved properly by deep networks. Hence, they separate the task of extracting a lower-dimensional representation of objects from the visual scenes from the task of reasoning with knowledge-graphs. The other camp feels that we can do end-to-end training of a neural network and it can learn how to jointly learn a good lower-dimensional representation for each symbol along with learning how to reason with them. I am no expert at this but here are a few papers that I find are worthy for you to read -

Neuro Symbolic Concent Learner Paper, Code
Learning Reasoning Strategies in End-to-End Differentiable Proving Paper, Code
Neuro-Symbolic Visual Reasoning: Disentangling “Visual” from “Reasoning” Paper
Knowledge Infused Learning (K-IL):
Towards Deep Incorporation of Knowledge in Deep Learning Paper
Visual Concept-Metaconcept Learning Paper Project Page
CVPR 2020 workshop on Neuro-Symbolic Visual Reasoning and Program Synthesis youtube videos

If you are looking for community maintained lists, here is one  list of papers